The latest instalment in our series of classic of classic reports was published in the Guardian on May 13 1977. Earlier that week Kerry Packer had kick-started the transformation of cricket by announcing the formation of World Series Cricket. His chief ally in this privately funded breakaway venture, Tony Greig, had just been stripped of the England captaincy as punishment. This article focuses on one of the greatest talents of the modern era, Barry Richards. Prevented from representing South Africa by the sanctions against apartheid, Richards quickly grew bored of cricket and came to rely on earning money as his chief source of motivation. This interview seeks to explain Richards' side of the story, and in an era when the Indian Premier League is threatening to lure players away from international cricket the points made about the discrepancy between the money in the game and the amounts being paid to the players are especially prescient. The author is Richard Yallop, a sports writer for the Guardian who moved to Australia in 1978 to write for the The Age. Much loved by his fellow journalists, Yallop was primarily a tennis writer, and wrote six books on the subject. He died in 2006, aged 58.Barry Richards is the finest batsman in the world. He is to cricket what Johnny Miller is to golf, Jimmy Connors is to tennis, Johan Cruyff is to soccer. His approximate earnings over the last year, split between a season in Australia and a season in England, are £20,000. The other three will start counting when they get over $500,000. This year Richards has a benefit season with Hampshire. He joined them from his native South Africa in 1968 when the cricket authorities allowed every county to have one overseas player in their side. He will spend much of this summer shaking hands on village greens, flogging draw tickets, smiling and then, at the end of it he may have £25,000-plus to show for it. He remembers Johnny Miller received $80,000 for two appearances in Australia last winter. Richards was feeling ill-disposed towards the press last week. He is one of the players who will represent the Rest of the World against Australia on Kerry Packer's Cricket Circus this winter, and the views expressed by several writers that he and the rest were selling cricket's birthright for a mess of Australian dollars opened an old wound. In the winter of 1970-71 he played a season for South Australia and was sponsored by Coca-Cola to the tune of a dollar a run. The largely conservative cricket press branded him as the first cricket mercenary: "Somehow mercenary sounded better than professional cricketer in the press. People accept what golfers earn but now cricketers are going to earn $20,000 over six months they are saying money is rearing its ugly head again. I just can't understand why people don't want cricketers to earn a lot of money. "The press are all saying we're money grabbing but if a newspaperman was offered $50,000 by NBC, he'd be off in a trail of dust. No one moaned at Duncan McKenzie when he went to Anderlecht for £200,000. Tony Greig is making a protest. If he was paid the same amount that Kerry Packer is offering him, he would play for England. He's the only one honest enough to say that he's in the job for the money." Richards, like the other cricket stars, is aware that he is now at the peak of his earning potential; but in three years, when he retires at 35, the only thing that will be remembered about him are the statistics in Wisden. He says present dissatisfaction both here and in Australia has as much to do with the administration of cricket as the rewards on offer. "Cricket is very old-fashioned and it's about time it changed. But Alec Bedser and those people don't understand that. It's just like schoolboys and teachers. The players are told what they can and can't do. You're told you can't put an emblem on your shirt because it lowers the tone of the game, but no one bothers to think how about much money it will bring in." Ironically, the game in England has never been as prosperous. Almost a million pounds has gone into Lord's this year in sponsorship and television rights for the Test series with Australia, and the prize money for the three one-day competitions - the Gillette Cup, the Benson and Hedges Cup, and the John Player League - has again risen. But at the same time the character of the game has changed, with the emphasis moving from the leisurely progress of the three-day county championship to the one-day competitions. Richards is only one of many county cricketers who feel the pressure to win in one day competitions has taken the pleasure out of playing. Instant excitement has introduced a different type of spectator. "The tradition was that people in pinstripes and bowler hats went to cricket matches, but you just have to listen to the yahooing that goes on at Sunday League matches to know that's not true any more. "There's no delight any more in the battle between the bat and the ball. There's no more aesthetic value in it. It should really be played on a synthetic surface with a true bounce and short boundaries, so that you can smash the ball all over the ground." Richards arrived at Hampshire in 1968 when the game's administrators were trying to raise it from its moribund state by allowing overseas players into the counties to attract more spectators. When he started playing cricket in South Africa he had no thoughts other than playing for his country. But in 1970 he became a victim of apartheid. The international cricket community ostracised South Africa for her politics, and after playing in four Tests against Australia, in which he averaged 72 an innings, he found himself without a Test career. It was like Don Bradman being banned from Test cricket after four matches. The sole purpose left to him was the money he could earn from his year-long shuttle between England and South Africa or Australia. He has accepted his loss philosophically, but it becomes more galling as the possibility of ever playing for South Africa grows more dim. He sees no sign of a breakthrough. "There are more and more words but no action. It's just drifting; I've heard so many stories, but nothing happens, and meanwhile the years tick by. People may say I'm being unpatriotic but I did go out there for six years when I had been offered as much in Australia because I thought it would help." In the winter of 1975 he brushed with the authorities in South Africa. They had arranged a tour by a team of International Wanderers, including the Chappell brothers from Australia, but when Richards and Lee Irvine and Graeme Pollock, two other leading South Africans, heard they were to be paid one third of what the Wanderers were to be paid they pulled out of the first match. He started receiving cables saying, "My son is fighting on the border for 3.50 rand a day." The three of them relented for the last two matches, but the ill feeling remained. In his first season at Hampshire he was paid £1,300, more than any of his teammates, which created tensions with the senior English players who had already been with the county for 10 or 15 years. Now they accept he has a talent which he is selling to make a living. They find it more difficult to accept that there are days when he will not be interested in scoring runs even though he is receiving two-and-a-half times their salary. Richards himself is the first to admit he finds it difficult to motivate himself, having achieved all he can outside of Test cricket. His captain, Richard Gilliat, is in a good position to judge: "Undoubtedly there have been instances where if he was on £1 a run he would have made a big score whereas he made a reasonable score. But the biggest incentive is to show him the averages in June and see three or four overseas players up above him." His pride in his own ability as a batsman will motivate him more than money. The best example of that came two years ago when Hampshire met Yorkshire in the final of the Fenner Trophy, a one day competition held at Scarborough. It had been an effort to get Richards up to Scarborough and he had fooled about in the outfield for the semi-final. All that changed when Geoff Boycott scored a hundred in Yorkshire's innings. Richards responded with a magnificent match-winning century.